March Sister Challenge: Lorene

March was our first Sister Challenge. When Natalie and I came up the idea for this blog, I thought it would be fun to do some sort of month challenge where we both make something using the same pattern, fabric, theme, etc. SInce we live 2800 miles apart, it would be interesting to see what we come up with when we have no idea what the other person is doing!

For this first challenge I bought 3 fat quarters of St Patrick’s Day fabric from Fabric Depot. I sent it to Natalie with the challenge to make something awesome by March 17.

My inspiration for this challenge, were the fabric decorations my mom used to make. She has them for Christmas, Thanksgiving, Halloween, Easter, Valentine’s Day…even my hometown Parsippany Day! I think many were from fabric panels but I know she made some from scratch too. I can’t really hang anything from my door, so I decided to make a table topper.

My original concept for my abstract clover mini quilt

I was rather time crunched making this quilt, as I had recently had surgery and then had a snowboarding trip. However I was determined to complete this on time! So as I was cutting my strips I realized that putting my stripes on the diagonal would be much more complex. I decided to simplify this by doing stripes that ran parallel to the edges instead.

Lorene’s Modern 4 Leaf Clover Mini Quilt

Other than the stripes, I wanted everything to be very random and freeform. So I just eyeballed it when I cut the angle slices off the stripe blocks. This formed the negative space between each clover leaf. When it came time to quilt I used my walking foot and put some randomly spaced lines radiating from the center of the quilt. This came together very quickly for me. I guess I’m getting better at quilting! My only hiccup was that I used metallic thread and my walking foot to finish my machine binding and it definitely didn’t turn out straight. Oh well!

The final quilt measured around 18″ x 18″ and I finished it right before work on St Patrick’s Day. In addition to the 3 prints, I used gold and black Kona cottons.